Norman Rockwell (6 page)

Phoebe Waring and John Rockwell appeared well positioned to contribute to the vitality of the city their forebears had helped create, through yet another prominent union of Yonkers’s best families. They had three children, who grew up in Yonkers, where, eleven years after their marriage, John and Phoebe had purchased “a beautiful residence on Locust Hill,” according to local histories. Their firstborn—a daughter, Grace Waring Rockwell—dutifully attended Drew Seminary, a girls’ school in Carmel, New York, where she was graduated in 1882. The middle child, and the paternal grandfather’s namesake, Samuel Darling, born in 1866, was later encouraged to work with his father at the family business—when he deigned to work at all. A charming scoundrel, Samuel would assume an afterlife as the Rockwell family skeleton. And on December 10, 1867, Jarvis Waring Rockwell was born, as serious as his brother was frivolous. The youngest child would seem, temperamentally, the fusion of the stock he had come from, as if his name symbolized the merging of his parents’ pasts as well as their persons. In spite of his aura as an insignificant but ethical businessman and an honorable, caring father, Waring, as he was called, was an everyman worthy of respect, even if the circle who recognized him was small compared to the admirers of his father, John, and his grandfather Samuel.

In truth, John Rockwell’s station in life had been somewhat of a comedown for Phoebe Waring. The Rockwells had done well, but the Warings had gotten rich, and they preferred that money marry money. Still, Phoebe’s husband worked hard, that much was clear to everyone in Yonkers—a good thing, since the grinding daily commute between Yonkers and New York City required his kind of industrious nature. John Rockwell was a minor executive in the Manhattan coal industry, his office located at 1 Broadway in the Wall Street district along the waterfront. During the early period of their marriage, the demands of the Civil War more than kept the new husband in business: John felt a particularly keen responsibility to supply the Union troops efficiently because of the fate of his younger brother George, a sergeant of Company B, 23rd Regiment Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry. Gallant George had been captured and “mortally wounded” on December 29, 1862, the final day of the battle at Stone River. Only two months before his death, John had experienced the good fortune of marrying Phoebe Waring, and now wanted to prove himself in the name of his dead brother as well as for the glory of his young wife.

Of this pantheon of illustrious forebears that Norman Rockwell could legitimately claim, he chose to remember that “my grandmother [Phoebe Waring] was related to Robert Getty. . . . otherwise, we have nothing to brag about,” an odd contortion of ancestral history. Not only had the Rockwells and Warings themselves achieved admirably and gained renown, but their connection to the Gettys was distant at best. Phoebe Waring’s sister, Anne Marie Waring, had married Walter Halsey Paddock, whose sister in turn had married Samuel E. Getty, Robert’s son. Their merger was only the latest of several between the Paddocks and the Gettys during the preceding fifty years, none of which changed the fact that any connections to the Rockwells were through marriage, not bloodlines. Furthermore, in complete contrast to the English blood that comprised Norman Rockwell’s own heritage, Robert Getty was from Londonderry, Ireland, his ancestors Scottish. But Robert Getty had been respected as one of the first prominent citizens to speak out against slavery, and Rockwell would have loved laying claim to such a liberal tradition, one that he had probably heard admiringly discussed. Getty’s great wealth as well must have awed Rockwell, who referred frequently to his own family’s financial straits. It is nonetheless startling that in spite of the fact that Rockwell had at his disposal an ideally constructed middle-class Yankee genealogy, made to order for the values promulgated by
The Saturday Evening Post,
he chose to dispatch that history with a few brief references. Instead, he identified either with the “name brand” nonrelative or with the less directly connected ancestors who lent themselves best to kindly caricature, characters such as his underappreciated artist grandfather, whose traits retained dramatic life from his childhood memories.

To be sure, the romance that blossomed between Nancy Hill and Waring Rockwell would yield plenty of theatrical fodder for their creative son. How the couple met is unclear, especially as Nancy was Episcopalian and Waring a Presbyterian in an age when courting often occurred at church functions. Nancy, however, was looking for a good man. “Apparently she was considered a bit of an old maid by the time she married at age twenty-five,” Mary Amy Orpen explains. Nancy and Waring got engaged the year that her mother and brother died, in spite of the young woman’s reservations about being three years older than her fiancé. Hard work had become an ancestral badge of honor by the time that Rockwell’s grandfather was building his coal business, and Waring appeared to be as steadfast and energetic as his father. He also proved malleable: two years after their engagement, Nancy convinced Waring to be confirmed in the Episcopal faith. He had already started receiving communion at Nancy’s modest St. Paul’s parish. Episcopalians trumped Presbyterians on the social pecking order; but the lifelong adoration Waring Rockwell held for his spouse suggests that society played little part in his embrace of her religion. All her life, according to Norman Rockwell, Nancy would believe that Waring had married down in taking her for his wife.

Almost three years after the couple became engaged, Nancy’s father died. Howard Hill was as itinerant in death as he had been in life. Inexplicably, it took his surviving children almost two years to arrange for his burial in St. John’s cemetery, and even then, his grave lay conspicuously separated from those of his wife and son. Nancy, twenty-three years old, was already living in Crompton, Rhode Island, with her older sister Susan and Susan’s husband, Samuel, when her father died, and she and “Susie” may have used their distance as a convenient excuse for failing to arrange for the patriarch’s interment. An Episcopal minister, Susie’s husband, Samuel Orpen, had recently been appointed rector of St. Philip’s, the first Episcopal church to have been erected in the Pawtuxet Valley, and his home provided a temporary oasis for his wife’s rootless sister. Two years after Hill’s death, Nancy achieved a respite from her insecure life. “She spoke often of having had ‘only’ a five-year engagement to Waring,” Mary Amy Orpen remembers. “ ‘I didn’t believe in long engagements’ is what she would explain. The truth is, in those days she was getting rather old to be a first-time bride, so instead of the ten years not uncommon for engagements then, she hurried things up a bit.” Local church records show that Anne Mary Hill and Jarvis Waring Rockwell, with his striking resemblance to the bride’s handsome dead brother, Tom, were wed at St. Philip’s on July 22, 1891. Samuel Orpen, Nancy’s brother-in-law, performed the ceremony at the Episcopal church, and he sponsored the wedding breakfast held in the rectory afterward. In attendance were ten-year-old Frances Amy Orpen (Susan’s daughter) as maid of honor and Samuel D. Rockwell, Waring’s brother, as best man. Nancy’s younger brother, Percevel Howard Hill, gave the bride away; her other sisters and adopted siblings had scattered throughout the country. Phoebe and John Rockwell, the groom’s parents, were present, as were Waring’s sister and her husband, and his great-aunt Anne Waring Paddock and her husband, Walter. The absence of parents on the bride’s side poignantly bespoke the devastation tuberculosis had visited upon the Hills; nor had its reign ended, as the wedding party would discover soon enough.

The beauty of the ceremony and the “prettily decorated” church, festooned with “palms and flowers,” served to remind everyone that although Nancy Hill was marrying into one of Yonkers’s most reliable and well-established families, her own background enabled her to ennoble the surroundings with her inherited artistic (and aristocratic) taste. Having her sister’s husband perform the Episcopal rites also suggested that Waring Rockwell was marrying his equal. Nancy ensured that the wedding conveyed an “agreeable fascination,” as the local paper termed it: “The bride and maid of honor were attired in white, the bride carried a posy of duchess roses and the maid of honor a posy of white daisies. . . . The bridal party approached the chancel amid the quiet strains of the ‘Bridal Chorus.’ It was a beautiful and impressive scene—the solemnity of the occasion, the fragrance of the artistically arranged bridal blossoms, the grace of the bride and groom. . . .”

The couple moved into their modest spousal apartment at 206 West 103rd Street, near the northwestern boundary of Central Park, an area that had blossomed when the Ninth Avenue El brought it to life in 1880. Waring’s job as a clerk with the Manhattan regional branch of Philadelphia’s George Wood and Sons textile company provided him ample opportunities for promotion. In spite of the troubled economy of the early 1890s, considered by some experts to have encompassed the second-worst depression in American history, the fin de siècle beckoned from the horizon of Manhattan’s Upper West Side, with its promise of a fully functioning I.R.T. subway, a completed world-class cathedral, and further blossoming of academic institutions and residential expansions along Riverside and Morningside parks. Innovation and progress, replete with rewards for hardworking citizens like Waring Rockwell, heralded the decade ahead. And the newlyweds inherited a ready-made community: John Rockwell, for one, had traded his daily commute from the Yonkers homestead for an apartment in Manhattan, probably because his own fortunes had been damaged during the recent downturn in the economy. Cousins lived in the city as well, and Nancy’s own relatives were all within visiting distance. Following the lead of her pious mother, however, the new bride established as her first social circle the committees of the local Episcopal church, St. Luke’s.

So it was that on September 29, 1892, the Rockwells’ first child was born a native New Yorker. Jarvis Waring Rockwell, Jr.—called “Jerry” during his childhood—took his place as firstborn and father’s namesake. For the next year and a half, Waring, as conscientious and sober as his hapless father-in-law had been unreliable, worked doubly hard to accommodate the family’s growing financial needs, while Nancy responded to the seemingly never-ending demands of a new baby. In spite of Jerry’s age, she even forced herself to take him to Crompton to see her sister and brother-in-law, because the Orpens were making sounds about moving somewhere warmer that might improve the minister’s lingering cough. In the summer of 1893, amid great concern that the cotton business would be affected by the recent stock market crash on June 29, a loving but plaintive wife informed her already diligent husband that his efforts would need to increase, since it appeared that they were to have another child early the following year.

3

City Boy, Born and Bred

By midnight on February 2, 1894, snow was predicted for the following day. At least a month earlier, Waring Rockwell had dutifully informed his boss that any time now he might fail to show up at work; his wife, convinced she had a sickly constitution, insisted that her husband be prepared for a premature delivery. Instead, pretty much on schedule, she had gone into labor that evening, and now Waring awaited anxiously the appearance of Dr. Grant, who arrived in plenty of time to assist Norman Percevel Rockwell, feet first, into the world at two
A.M.
on February 3, hours before the first snowflake fell. The elaborate miniature bedclothes Nancy had expertly embroidered in hopes of fitting them to a girl this time seemed a bit frilly in the (slightly horsey) face of this gangly infant, she had to admit. Nevertheless, incongruous or not, he would wear them. The newborn’s eighteen-month-old brother was quickly sent away to Waring’s sister’s large country home in Nyack, where Grace and Sherman Johnson had two older boys to keep young Jerry amused.

Pictures of Norman Rockwell dating from his first few years reveal a wary child whose gaze seems preternaturally fearful and impatient at the same time. In more ways than this, the child was truly father of the man. Rockwell would consistently narrate his feelings far more expressively through his face than through his conversation. Consider this experiment: cover the top half of any photograph of the adult, then reverse the trick and look at the eyes only, bereft of the inevitably upcurved lips. Impossibly, the heavily hooded eyes stare forth boldly and tentatively at the same time. Rarely does their emotion match the implication of the smiling mouth. Pleasant though wary, provocative if emotionally removed, happy but sad: these are the paradoxes that defined the man as well as the boy. Apparently, the personality they reflect was laid down early and irrevocably.

The tension that even the toddler wears on his face seems part of what would prove his mother’s mixed legacy. By default as much as design, Nancy Hill yoked her sons to stereotypes: Jerry represented the masculine ideal in the household, and Norman the effete nobleman. Somewhat reminiscent of British primogeniture, where the firstborn son inherits the manor, Jerry, named after his father, was to be successful in business, and a “real man” besides; Norman, tasked by his names to represent the royal as well as the feminine side of the family tree, would develop his artistic talents. Accordingly, Nancy projected the appropriate behavior onto each son: she encouraged Jerry to be aggressive, strong, and fearless, while she reassured Norman that he was weak, like she was, and therefore probably entitled to protection as a result—though she quickly turned the equation around so that he was meant to succor her.

Through the names she bestowed on her sons at birth, Nancy hinted at the duality she would use to guide their development. Rockwell ruminated aloud that “My mother, an Anglophile . . . and very proud of her English ancestry, named me after Sir Norman Perceval (‘Remember, Norman Percevel,’ she’d say, ‘it’s spelled with an e; i and a are common’). . . . The line from Sir Norman to me is tortuous but unbroken, and my mother insisted that I always sign my name Norman Percevel Rockwell. ‘Norman Percevel,’ she’d say, ‘you have a valiant heritage. Never allow anyone to intimidate you or make you feel the least bit inferior. There has never been a tradesman in your family. You are descended from artists and gentlemen.’ ”

The strained stories about their royal heritage that Nancy repeated to Lord Perceval’s New York namesake (she seems to have been quite mistaken about the spelling of the name) sounded dubious to Rockwell even when he was young, contributing to a lifelong gentle scorn toward his mother. He felt diminished, not elevated, by bearing so patently inappropriate a name as this sign of his mother’s misplaced pride, and he “darn near died” when a boy called him “Mercy Percy” in his youth. It was Jerry, named after one of the family’s true Yankee aristocrats, Jarvis Waring, who got handed the real identity, as far as the younger son could see. Somewhat gratifying to the competitive older child, such classification encouraged Rockwell to believe from an early age that his own masculinity was never the given that his brother’s was—“I had the queer notion that Percevel (and especially the form Percy) was a sissy name, almost effeminate”—and he lived “in terror” of being ridiculed because of it. His idea was not queer; it was an accurate reflection of his times. At this point in American culture, media use of the name Percevel functioned as a kind of shorthand for pretentious, effete old-worldisms. The crusty H. L. Mencken even warned parents that giving their sons such a “sissy” name was tantamount to ensuring a childhood of playground fights for Percevel to defend his masculine honor. Rockwell would always feel himself falling short of the model American male, and having to stave off the identity attached to
Percevel,
a part of his name until he left home, contributed to his insecurity.

Oddly, in light of such perceptions and his relatives’ own observations to the contrary, Norman (as well as Jerry) confusedly believed that he had been the favorite son, a complicated assessment buttressed by Nancy’s unfortunate edicts to her friends that “Norman and I are so alike, we might as well be Siamese twins.” In spite of evidence suggesting that she did in fact favor Jerry, her oppressive attention to Norman conferred benefits as well as caused distress. Although it does seem that she was generously possessed of hypochondria, self-centeredness, and intellectual banality, Nancy Hill also displayed a startling flexibility, a sometimes charming eccentricity, close attention to detail, and a resolute will to get whatever she wanted—this last characteristic closely observed by her younger son. An unpredictable sense of fun coexisted with her often rigid propriety, and her pleasure in the ribald seems the probable source of Rockwell’s own famously naughty humor: “I know that I was shocked when my aunt Nancy thought nothing of my going skinny-dipping with a mixed group of young people in the 1940s,” Mary Amy Orpen recalls. “She saw the sketch I made of the event, and she said, ‘I’m appalled.’ When I asked her why, she said, ‘It is too early in the season; in May you can still catch your death of cold.’ ”

In all fairness, the stress Nancy labored under shortly after Norman’s birth would have weakened the most determined mother’s resolve to tend cheerfully a newborn and a toddler not yet two years old. Her brother-in-law, the Reverend Samuel Orpen, had become so ill that he had resigned from St. Philip’s. In spite of the signs that consumption once again preyed on her family, Susan Orpen optimistically agreed that the strain of running what were essentially two parishes had caused her husband’s exhaustion. The young minister and his family stayed on at the rectory until Samuel felt recovered enough to travel to Welden, North Carolina, to take on a new church job. Susan remained behind to oversee the packing of the household, and to visit with her sister’s new baby, she hoped, before leaving for the rectorate in the South.

Instead, she received a telegram stating that her husband was stricken yet again—with “apoplexy.” According to rectory accounts, their loyal Crompton physician traveled all the way to Welden to bring the minister back to Rhode Island, where he could recover among friends and family. By mid-July, Samuel appeared strong enough to set out again, but it was felt that he needed a vacation to recuperate fully. Frances, their nineteen-year-old daughter, moved in with Nancy and Waring, and the Orpens departed for Europe.

Frances, who had been Nancy’s youthful maid of honor nine years before, was a favorite of Waring’s as well. Now she would prove helpful with the younger charges. Still, Nancy was all too aware of what her brother-in-law’s fevers and coughs signaled, and by now she would have surmised the threat that contaminated family members posed to one another. She had already observed the symptoms of consumptive tuberculosis up close five times in the past fifteen years; the disease was wiping out her relatives. She knew how to interpret Susan’s own increasing fragility and recurring colds; if Samuel had tuberculosis, his wife would most likely die not too long after him.

Nancy Rockwell understood that lives entwined with the Hill family proved more provisional than most. Her distant affection for her own children must have stemmed not only from her mother’s example but from, at the very least, an unconscious fear of losing them. She didn’t know the epidemic pattern of the disease, which would have depressed her further: the bacterial tuberculosis that had not finished its sweep through her family had most likely left its calling card with every person in continual close physical contact with the Hills. The lucky ones would escape its activation, though the germs would live in their host until death, ready for activation if the immune system failed. Poverty, poor nutrition, and overcrowding were conditions that ensured the disease a stranglehold; alternations of feast and famine in Howard Hill’s household must have weakened many of the inhabitants, making his family perfect incubators for the unwelcome guest. Consumption was not yet a rare condition by the end of the nineteenth century, but the degree to which it ravaged Nancy’s family seems more characteristic of the garrets of
La Bohème
than the boardinghouses of Yonkers.

The Hills’ mode of moving from one communal home to another depending on Howard’s work status had raised hope as often as it dashed expectations. Nancy had accepted such varying domestic rhythms as the norm, and the frequent relocations that she grew up with soon began to punctuate her married life. Around 1896, when Norman was two years old, the family moved to a railroad apartment at 789 St. Nicholas Avenue, near 149th Street, a sign that their financial resources were improving, especially since they had weathered the market crash and assimilated the costs of a second child comfortably. In later years, the illustrator remembered the fourth-floor walk-up as dark and gloomy but, however modest the apartment, its location farther uptown where real estate cost more and new buildings were being planned around anticipated mass transit stations marked a rise in his family’s fortunes. Whatever his parents believed, however, he stockpiled memories of a “pitifully genteel” neighborhood, composed of monolithic four- and five-story apartment buildings with a few private houses scattered in their midst. The residential area was actually a typical one for low-level white-collar workers at the turn of the century, and in fact most of the apartment buildings were erected after 1904, when the subway opened, but Rockwell cast the far Upper West Side peremptorily as “lower middle-class with a smattering of poorer families.” Most of all, he never forgot that “the tough slum districts were east of us toward Third Avenue.”

Nancy and Waring depended on Jerry to defend their younger child against the dangers they carefully detailed for both sons. By the time Jerry turned five or six, the athletic, confident, bright child functioned as a useful guide into boyhood society for his little brother. Allowed to tag along, primarily because the pecking order was so apparent, Norman learned to socialize easily with the friends that Jerry effortlessly gathered around him. And Norman felt safe with his strong older brother at his side, since disaster awaited him at every street corner, according to the warnings his nervous mother issued daily. But the fraternal closeness always on the verge of emerging was smothered under the pressure of Nancy’s awkward maternal gestures. Continuing to send Jerry to “have fun” with relatives in the country when her own nerves were frayed, Nancy clumsily tried to reassure her firstborn that his family would be there when he returned, emphasizing instead his dethroning: “Little Norman didn’t feel well again yesterday, so he crawled into bed and slept with me,” she once cheerfully wrote the young boy, a message he would recount to his own children years later, in wonder.

Jerry created his own defenses against his childhood. A personal memoir that he penned after his sibling had become famous recalls, perhaps defensively, his pity for poor Norman’s plight: while the older boy got to go play with cousins his own age in Providence, Rhode Island each summer—“I considered myself very lucky as I had a bicycle there”—his little brother was stuck at home. “I always felt sorry for Norman,” he wrote. In truth, Jerry grew up resentful of his brother, their relationship tainted from the start by his parents’ insensitive handling of baby Norman’s displacement of the little toddler. Shipping the eighteen-month-old off to relatives whenever Nancy felt overtaxed was hardly designed to assuage his fears. Norman, as the baby, had to stay with “Mama,” but Jerry could temporarily become a cousin’s responsibility. “My father said that Norman was always sick,” Jerry’s son, Dick Rockwell, remembers. And Jerry himself admitted that “I have very little memory of him as a baby. He was always frail, quite thin and I considered him delicate. I was rather rough I’m afraid and did not play very gently with my young brother.”

Norman, striving to emulate his brother and gain his approval, sought opportunities to join in the older boy’s activities. Luckily, when Jerry began grammar school at P.S. 46, Norman quickly discovered a sure way to increase his own currency: he learned to draw. Although his father had actually been copying pictures from magazines for years, Jerry’s obviously important homework—completed at the dining room table under his father’s watchful eyes—goaded Norman into joining the fraternity. After a few days of boredom, Norman asked “Papa” to teach him how to draw too, and then all three Rockwell “men” began a routine of working together every evening after dinner.